Ugh....if they replace taxis in an uber city context in lieu of some other public transportation, fine. Why is it that these initiatives are sold to us under safety, like the 55 mph speed limit (which has been completely debunked by years of statistics)? What happens if something not programed into the system occurs like a major weather event, car jacking, or terrorist event, or you forgot your wallet? Thank you, I still like making my own choices. Feel free to give me more information to make those choices however.

Self driving car is a very interesting and amazing thing for everybody, these type of cars are preferred by the people but how can it perform is important. In this type of car, they add the new technology and features for the better use, safety is the most necessary thing for this car.

If all cars become driverless, more safety and much less accidents should be expected. But it really depends on how reliable the system is - even for manual driven car nowadays, we still have problems/defects from time to time, which needs retrofit. Furthermore, the transition period will not be easy. Imagine the mix of manual-driven and driverless cars on the road - will it create more problems? If an accident happened between manual driven one and driverless one, how the responsibility should be decided?

These would be the same human brains that regularly make poor decisions and cause accidents? Even in a scenario where there is a tail percentage of situations in which the car does not make the right decision, the total number of accidents would still likely go down. However, addressing liability for those remaining accidents will be interesting.

I bike a lot, and I see how enraged a very few drivers get if they need to slow down for 15 or 30 seconds navigating alongside bicycles. Add to the mix a driverless car that's being extra careful around those cyclists, we're talking purple rage.

They contest it is better in some ways, and I think they may well be right. Humans lack the ability to concentrate for any real length of time, and repetitive tasks ease us into mindlessness. Computers can hold speed and distance with far more accuracy than a human, never gets bored or angry or drunk and can recognise patterns. The patterns are actually there in the highway code.

My one question is this - Would the passengers be liable for any accidents? Would Google be liable? It seems like a mess. I have a good driving record and enjoy pretty cheap insurance rates ($26/month from Insurance Panda.. woohoo!). I also enjoy taking my car out for a spin and enjoying the 'freedom' of being able to drive anywhere. Will the driverless car allow all this? If not, I'll have to pass.

IMO.. Until they can ensure that there are no humans taking control of the wheel, insurance will be needed... at least uninsured motorist. Who knows? Maybe insurance as we know it will go away, replaced by any number of models that would more accurately represent the new risk distribution.

The idea of self driving cars is all very great but I still believe that it will never be entirely practical. No matter how hard Google try and no matter how many test drives they take, it is simply not possible to prepare the car for all possible types of encounters that may take place on the road. Some of these need a working human brain to handle without making mistakes. I therefore believe that a more practical model would be to come up with a self-driving car that can also be controlled by human beings so that in situations such as the one above the human driver can make a judgment call and save the day.

We do have some in the busier area but since it is the older population with slow reflexes who do things like run through lights late there's less emphasis put on the cameras than you might see if it was younger groups racing through them. Everyone jokes about being hit by some little old lady that can't see over the wheel but a camera isn't going to stop that. There is an area where there is a lot of pedestrian traffic, they have speed bumps that pop up out of the ground when people are crossing, flashing lights everywhere and red light cameras, but people still get hit crossing the road there. I'd love to see robot cars for anyone over 80.

"Behaving with a degree of propriety has been on the wane for the past several decades."

(etc.)

Amusing answer ;-) I think that trust will be the biggest factor initially, and having 1 Google Car per 10,000 on the roads makes its behavior an oddity and thus a target. Make it 1 in 10, and now it starts changing road behavior in bulk.

It's a bit like these cars that can travel in convoy on highways using computer-controlled adaptive cruise control. Hooray, so long as every car involved supports that technology. It's a bit tricker when you have to mix the old and the new in the same place.

As InformationWeek Government readers were busy firming up their fiscal year 2015 budgets, we asked them to rate more than 30 IT initiatives in terms of importance and current leadership focus. No surprise, among more than 30 options, security is No. 1. After that, things get less predictable.